Editorial Style Guide
An editorial style guide is the house rulebook for the small writing decisions teams keep arguing about: how you capitalize things, which punctuation you prefer, which words are approved or banned, how you write numbers and dates, and how links are handled. Settle each rule once, write it down, and writers and editors stop relitigating it on every piece. It is the practical partner to a voice and tone guide: voice and tone decide how the brand should sound, the style guide decides what is simply correct.
The rulebook for grammar, punctuation, terminology, and formatting.
One house rule beats a hundred editor debates.
When to use this
- When the same copyediting corrections recur across pieces, the same words are always changed by the same editor.
- When scaling to multiple writers, external partners, or a global team where regional conventions vary.
- Alongside a voice and tone guide, covering the mechanical layer the personality document leaves untouched.